CANADA'S ENVIRONMENT LOSES KEY ALLY IN RESHUFFLING

Out on the West coast of Vancouver Island, four essentials made
for one of life's great afternoons: The presence of my sweetie,
good red wine, a lonesome beach and the Pacific Ocean. We hiked
down the West Coast Trail out of Bamfield for about five miles,
used ropes to descend a muddy slope, and reveled in a seascape
of rocks and surf, eagles and seals.

Pacific Rim National Park has other joys. Several friends have
kayaked through the Broken Islands. Families experience the surf
of Long Beach and tide pools of Florencia Bay. The town of
Tofino rocks. Trekkers do the full 50-mile West Coast Trail, a
route originally laid out to save lives of seafarers wrecked on
the wild coast.

The person we could thank for the experience was a slightly
stuffy politician from Victoria, who successfully campaigned for
the national park after being elected to Canada's House of
Commons in 1968.

The time to thank David Anderson is now.

After an up-and-down career -- the last 11 years in the federal
Cabinet -- Anderson lost his position as Canada's environment
minister when Prime Minister Paul Martin unveiled his new
Cabinet on July 20, 2004. He is out of the Cabinet, but still in
Parliament. "It's awful important when people try to do the
right thing, you give them a bit of credit," John Fraser, a
former Speaker of the House of Commons and political foe of
Anderson, reflected.

The British Columbia government is gung-ho to drill for oil in
waters off the Queen Charlotte Islands. In order for
the drilling platforms to go in, Canada's federal government
will have to lift a 33-year moratorium on drilling off
the West Coast. Anderson was a voice of restraint, in Fraser's
words, "insisting that proper environmental and scientific
studies be done in advance" and that oil companies pay for
independent evaluation.

The new minister, Stephane Dion, is from Quebec and has little
experience with environmental issues. A Nova Scotia lawmaker was
named minister of fisheries and oceans.

Anderson was fisheries minister in the 1990s and helped pull off
-- with Gov. Gary Locke -- settlement of the long-running
Pacific salmon dispute between the United States and Canada.
Both men traded risks. Despite an uproar from commercial and
sport fishers, Anderson curtailed the catch of endangered
chinook and coho salmon bound for Puget Sound rivers. In turn,
Locke kept U.S. fishermen from catching sockeye salmon from the
so-called "early Stuart" run, which migrates more than 850 miles
upstream in the Fraser River system. Locke's action may have
saved the run: Warm water conditions were causing record
instream mortality.

Direct negotiations between a Canadian Cabinet member and a U.S.
governor were unusual. "It was strange," recalled Locke.
"Backstage, the White House was encouraging us while the State
Department was saying, 'You can't do this.' Ultimately our ad-
hoc agreements provided the impetus for a U.S.-Canada treaty."
"David took a lot of heat on it. We had to run a gauntlet of
jeers when we made the announcement up north. I enjoyed working
with him."

Of course, Anderson could also be a knucklehead. He would hear
no objection to Victoria dumping 11 million gallons of raw
sewage each day into the Strait of Juan de Fuca: Even as the
area closed to shellfishing grew, the environment minister held
fast to Canadians' curious doctrine that the solution to
pollution is dilution.

The minister was never a man to humor. A furious phone call from
Victoria greeted me after a Channel 9 show in which one panelist
joked that the Canadian government should deal with Victoria
sewage in its upcoming Speech from the Throne. Similarly,
Anderson was visibly angered at attention-seeking Greenpeacers,
and protests from everybody-is-a-sellout-but-us
environmentalists complaining that he wasn't moving fast enough
on endangered species or air emissions.

It's always much easier to hurl spears in protest than to carry
the shield of authority. South of the border, on the day
Anderson was being bounced from the Cabinet, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency's regional boss John Iani
announced his departure.

Iani will be remembered for standing up to a Canadian mining
giant, Teck Cominco, whose smelter in Trail, B.C., has
discharged pollutants downstream into our Lake Roosevelt.

Teck Cominco launched a public relations blitz that collected
the usual industry allies -- local county commissioners and the
three Republican members of Washington's congressional
delegation. EPA has insisted, however, that under U.S. law it has
final authority over the scope of contamination studies and the
measures undertaken to clean up the lake. Iani has also shown
courage standing up to local politicians who resisted cleanup of
mine wastes in Idaho's Silver Valley.

It's a pretty fair record, in an administration that has
repeatedly kowtowed to polluters.

Up north, the dominant new British Columbia voice in Canada's
Cabinet belongs to Industry Minister David Emerson. He was until
recently chief executive at Canfor, one of the province's major
forest products firms. Early statements by Emerson indicate that
the Canadian and B.C. governments will now push ahead to put
drilling platforms off the Queen Charlottes. Hecate Strait is a
notoriously stormy place. Several prominent scientists, noting
clockwise tidal movement, warn that a blowout spill could foul
beaches, islands and estuaries along many miles of the north
coast.

David Anderson is without a seat at the Cabinet table. He still
has a platform in Parliament. Hopefully, he will do something
that was verboten as a government minister.

The term Hemerophyta includes all plants of any area,
directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally
distributed, protected or supported by man, including those
that are cultivated, domesticated, reared, bred or kept in
captivity. See Wagenitz, G., 1996: Woerterbuch der Botanik.
Fischer, Jena, 531 p.

Abstract

The complexity of crop plant research is demonstrated by three
examples of plants with different histories, values and
perspectives in agriculture: the roses, an ancient leek and
a tropical weed species. An awareness of human influence on
diversity and our ability to cause global changes will hopefully
induce more sensibility in managing the environment.

Introduction

Growing numbers of plants and animals are distributed throughout
the world by human activities. Within the plants, regarding
their degree of hemeroby, we distinguish between cultivated
plants or crops, weeds and wild plants. Primary crops have been
derived from wild plants by selection, cultivation and direct
domestication. Secondary crops developed from crop-mimetic
weeds, i.e. from co-domesticated wild plants (convergent type).
The non-convergently evolved weeds have largely disappeared from
utilization (Scholz 1996). Secondary weeds are derived from
populations of former crops (Spahillari et al. 1999). In some
cases, all the abovementioned groups may be present within one
single plant species. This illustrates that the indication of
hemerobic or synanthropic organisms and the differentiation of
levels of synanthropy, such as a-, oligo-, meso- and eu-
hemeroby, are still difficult to distinguish. The longer the
processes of co-evolution continue, the closer the connection
becomes between plants, humans, and human culture.

Cultivated plant populations with dependence on human interest
for permanent cultivation are named Ergasiophyta (Kowarik 1985,
Sukopp 1995). These plants may have wild ancestors, wild, feral
or weedy relatives, but themselves do nor have any native
growing habitat, neither they are part of native living
communities and natural vegetation except such areas influenced
or created by man. The term Hemerophyta is introduced here to
define the group of plants, grown, planted, promoted or sown
by man. This group of plants contains weeds (segetalia,
ruderalia), crops, forestry plants, ornamental, park and garden
plants, gene bank accessions, material from botanic gardens.
As long as they grow under human supervision, they are not
considered to be wildgrowing. In contrast to Neobiota (see
below), the term Neo- Hemerophyta should be limited to plants
during their process of adaptation to new conditions and
locations. Established populations, permanently used and
annually grown crops would not retain the prefix "Neo" in the
respective environment. Feral, or escaping populations are also
not called Hemerophyta.

Human individuals, families and populations intercross, migrate
and trade, hence the plants intercross with their relatives.
Hybridization and introgressions from wild to cultivated plants
and vice versa occur spontaneously. The selecting pressures in
the respective populations are quite different. In native
communities, the fitness of individuals with crop characters is
reduced. In farms and gardens, plants with wild characters are
weeded out and not used for seed production. Plants and seeds
are distributed actively by man (crops) or passively (weeds,
wild plants) and present in their strong dependence on human
culture are special cases of invasive Neobiota. When the new
crops are integrated into agriculture in the new environment or
if they can escape and grow spontaneously at new localities, new
populations, subspecies and even new species may be generated
and distributed this way. The most synanthropic plants are
potential adventitious organisms and thus - as far as the
environmental conditions do not limit their further dispersal -
even cosmopolitans, using man with his travel, culture and
domesticated animals as vector for their own distribution
(hemerochorous and anthropochorous organisms).

Among other categories, autochthonous (or indigenous, apophytes)
and allochthonous (adventitious) plants are distinguished in
plant geography. Unfortunately, the terminology is insufficient
to clarify the situation of cultivated plants in detail as the
following examples illustrate. Tomatoes (Lycopersicon
esculentum) and garden beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) originate
from the Americas (at the species level) and have their primary
centers of diversity there. In gardens of Africans, Asians,
Australians and Europeans, they are neophytic Ergasiophyta and
have replaced other vegetables or reduced their respective
growing areas since about 1500. At present they are Hemerophyta
in all mentioned parts of the world. The farmers, gardeners and
later on the plant breeders here have selected the plants quite
differently. Thus, they developed new characters and new
diversity in these so called secondary centers of diversity,
without having counterparts in the primary centers. However,
the question arises, whether it is justified to name
infraspecific plant groups like these or e.g. allotetraploid
crop species like rape (Brassica napus) homeless, Xenophyta,
Anecophyta or Indigenophyta anthropogena (see Sukopp & Scholz
1997), since their places of origin are not exactly known and
they do not occur in native vegetation? How does the locality
of origin or creation influence the future growing area of
a crop - including genetic modified organisms (transgenic
cultigens) - or how might it determine the size of a potential
growing territory of any wild plant? As the examples illustrate,
the term "Neophyta" is defined for and occupied by "new" plants,
established in vegetation after 1500. How long do Neobiota and
Neocenoses (Kowarik 1985) remain "new"? In other words, which
term should be applied to really new plants and plant
communities or those with the potential to invade native or
agricultural systems 500 years after 1492? In dimensions of
annuals, this means 500 generations later.

To illustrate potentials, chances, our lack of knowledge and
missing systematics in terminology even in crop plant research,
three cases of plants are described below. The present status
and perspectives in Germany are discussed here in brief for a
genus of ornamental plants, for a traditional vegetable from the
leek group, and for a tropical weed species.

Roses (Genus Rosa)

The "queen of the flowers" is an excellent example for a
taxonomically very complicated genus, containing wild plants,
originating from the northern hemisphere and their nowadays
widely spread cultivated descendants. Many of the 100-200 wild
species intercross and have a remarkable infraspecific
variation. The beautiful, sweet smelling flowers are a symbol
for love and joie de vivre since ancient times. Roses are
cultivated as ornamentals but they are also grown for practical
uses: the thorny shrubs are planted in hedges against soil
erosion, the fragrant flowers are collected to produce attar of
roses, rosewater and perfumes, and the fruit is used for jam,
tea, medicinal or pharmaceutical purposes. Young sprouts, leaves
and buds are consumed as vegetables in some regions of the
world.

To describe, to classify and to maintain the continuously
evolving diversity of roses (infrageneric Neo-Hemerophyta) is a
Sisyphian task. For more than 100 years, interested people have
systematically collected wild and cultivated roses and have
maintained old and new rose varieties in special rosaria and
gardens for roses. One of the most famous collections is the
European Rosarium in Sangerhausen, founded by the German Roses
Society in 1903. Thousands of old and new roses grow side by
side there, and each sown seed sample bears new diversity. But
the material is strictly propagated vegetatively. Recent
breeding aims in roses are e.g. to increase the content of
vitamins in the fruit and to reach new colors (blue).

The onion-leek from Ascalon (Allium ascalonicum Strand?)

This plant is a relic crop with quite doubtful nomenclature and
classification. It is frequently confused or mixed with potato
onion and shallots (Tittel 1986). Originating from the Southern
Mediterranean area (Israel/Palestine?), it is an extremely rare
allochthonous crop in Germany. Probably introduced by the
crusaders, it is perhaps extinct in the area of origin and has a
very disjunct distribution today. One of the isolated locations
where this species can be found is in Germany. The plants found
in Germany are morphologically quite uniform. They are grown in
vineyard terraces around the city of Stuttgart only. For several
hundred years it was not mentioned and perhaps forgotten by
scientists (Gladis 1996, Gladis and Bross-Burkhardt 2000). The
‘shallot-leek’ perhaps might be related to or be developed
through influence with common onion (Allium cepa). It strongly
differs from onion by its specific aroma, its perennial growth
in dwarf bunches developing from very small, frequently dividing
subterranean bulbs and by having two growing seasons per year.
Adapted to summer drought and to frost, the leaves die in June
and late autumn. During winter, they start to grow again. The
foliage is used to prepare special dishes and these are consumed
in spring only. Dispersal by escaping to the wild and even to
the cultivated environment is not possible. The plant does bears
neither seeds nor bulbils; it is just vegetatively propagated by
dividing the slow growing bunches. Since it can not compete with
other crops and weeds , is completely dependent on careful
cultivation in special climatic and soil conditions, has never
been a market crop, and is constantly losing growing area, it
has become a highly endangered species. Losing the status of an
hemerophytic species, it will be extinct very soon.

The scientific comparison of all available and related material
is of great interest in order to find out whether plants that
are principally vegetatively propagated are able to adapt to
specific climate conditions, to modify their habit,and if
genetic distances within and between populations have developed
within the last thousand years. Initial research work on this
leek group has yielded interesting results (Friesen and Klaas
1998) and should be continued.

Witchweed [Striga hermonthica (Del.) Benth.]

Ladizinsky (1987) demonstrated that the patterns of pulse
domestication are completely different from the evolution of
cereals in the same region. In analogy, different domestication
patterns should be estimated for selection of e.g. vegetables,
spices and ornamentals too. There exist few cases of rare and
endangered annual weeds in Europe, which are frequently used
and grown as ornamentals now: the corn cockle and a related
wild species (Agrostemma githago, A. brachylobum),
the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), and the cut and drying
flower Bupleurum rotundifolium should be mentioned here.
Changes in fashion require frequent changes in ornamentals.
Breeders on the one hand have to follow these changes, on the
other hand they are free to influence next season’s fashion by
providing new and attractive colours, flower forms and habits.

Striga hermonthica and related species (Scrophulariaceae) are
common and dangerous weeds e.g. in dry and semi dry areas in
Africa. The plants are obligatory parasites on roots of
Sorghum, cereals, millets and grasses, grown in excessively
utilized, poor and eroded soil and are supported by cultivation
measures. They are comparable to secondary parasites.
International research programs on these weeds try to reduce
infection rates, to find native antagonists, to interrupt
reproductive cycles and to stop seed distribution
(Kroschel et al. 1999).

Quite new is the aspect of attractiveness of this plant. The
danger of infection of European fields may be excluded by the
extremely high germination temperature. Together with tropical
grasses, Striga hermonthica might be developed as a
fascinating new ornamental in urban areas. Plant breeders will
include this species into their breeding programs (Kroschel &
Gladis 2000). In Europe, the cultivation of this weed has not
yet left the experimental phase.

Prospects

The situation of mankind and that of plant genetic resources in
past and present justify the fear of ongoing marginalization of
neglected and underutilized crops (Hammer and Heller 1998). Many
of the less important cultivated plants will be extinct in the
near future if they are not maintained ex situ - in gene banks
and in botanical gardens. Unfortunately, financial support for
research on the described subject strongly depends on
the applied technology, not on the package of questions.

The tendency toward uniform arable land, culture and crop plants
consumed by mankind will increase during advanced globalization.
Human influence on plant and animal diversity and his ability to
cause global changes in climatic conditions, in soil and in
water chemistry will hopefully induce a greater sense of
responsibility in managing the environment and will lead to
consideration of alternative economic models. Therefore, it is
necessary to reassert the moral objective of stewardship and to
incorporate ecological science into policy. In addition to that
Roughgarden (1995) demands:

Economic theory must be fundamentally improved to take account of the dynamic changes in the environment that different policies make.

We do not know enough about our own systems of economics and
values to make any prognoses regarding sustainable use and
maintenance of biodiversity on earth. If economists take costs
into account in setting environmental or other objectives, they
should also look at the costs for benefits lost forever.
Hemerophyta are the most suitable, preconditioned plant group
for research and use. Each further loss in their diversity will
be more difficult to compensate than the previous.

BLACKBURN PRESS - BOTANICAL PUBLICATIONS

From: Andrea Herbert [AHerbert@BlackburnPress.com]

The Blackburn Press concentrates on bringing classic scientific
and technical books back into print. We make an occasional foray
into printing new books, and one of those titles is on this
list: Woody Plants for the Central and Northern Prairies.

I have put together a list of our plant-related titles (below),
with the author's name and a link to the page of our web site
where you will find further information about each book. Many of
our books have multiple classifications, so these books will
have been scattered on the web site among biology, botany,
ecology, forestry and even archaeology.

A Theory of Forest Dynamics: The Ecological Implications of
Forest Succession Models, by Herman H. Shugart,